


Please Hold

by MilkshakeKate



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Awkward Conversations, Developing Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Gaby is Purposefully Terrible at Russian, Illya Cares About Stew, Long-Distance Relationship, Mutual Masturbation, Mutual Pining, Napoleon Solo Ships Illya Kuryakin/Gaby Teller, Phone Sex, Russian Lessons, Sexual Tension, They've Kissed, Voice Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-09
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-06-01 04:40:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6501205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MilkshakeKate/pseuds/MilkshakeKate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Illya returns to Moscow, Gaby doesn't expect to miss his voice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Trabi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trabi/gifts).



> Promised this a little while ago! Stemming from Trabi's v amusing (v valid) comment about Illya Kuryakin becoming seemingly Indecent in a phone booth in [**Subtlety**](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6220816), so this just sort of happened! whOOps!

Illya’s voice is a double-edged sword. The first edge, the side that cuts shallow and fades quick, is that of the occupying soldiers; their soviet anthems whistling through her childhood’s East Berlin. That echo had tainted his language for her, until she decided to learn it for herself; take hold of it, sharpen it, form something tangible she could bark back at them if she were ever given the chance. She practises her Russian with Solo in secret. She likes to throw Illya off with a few dropped nouns to see him pause, watch him soften a little for the proof of her study.

The other edge is only incidental, but its blow no less devastating. When Illya speaks, even off duty, his every word is chosen with weighted purpose and, despite herself, Gaby strains to hear him. Even when it’s another tirade, another bemoaning - what has she done wrong this time? - she finds herself attentive, caring less for the words and more for their low, precise delivery over her head. She feels for his voice. To stand too close is to let it travel through the chest. It has become a sensation she pursues, prompting her to ask questions he cannot simply grunt at.

She doesn’t care to think any deeper of it.

When Illya is pulled back to Moscow, she does not expect to miss his voice. His company, his expertise, his endless _looming_ \- she anticipates missing those. Dreads it, in the days before his departure.

So when he makes his first call three weeks later, it jolts through her like a pail of ice water.

“ _Do you hear me?_ ” he repeats, pressed. It crackles with poor reception, his voice pulled taut across the Baltic, the North Sea.

“Yes,” she says finally, grabbing the cord.

“ _Hello._ ”

“Hello, Illya. How are you? Where are you?” A long pause, unbroken. “Can you hear me?”

“ _— fine. I am in a pho—_ ”

“Good, I’m —”

“ _—ne booth, Staraya Square. Gaby? Did you say something?_ ”

“No. Yes, I thought you’d finished.”

“ _There is a delay,_ ” he says. “ _For the distance._ ”

Gaby waits and waits, and he waits too, in case he speaks over her. She glances at the clock, at the red streak of the second hand. Tick, tick, tick.

“Illya,” she braves. “Why have you called me?”

Another long pause. “ _No, it doesn_ _’t matter. Sorry to bother you. I’m—_ ”

“No, Illya—”

“ _—sorry, sleep well_.”

The call cuts out. She pretends he has run out of change.

\- - -

  
 

Gaby is expecting a call from Solo. He’s due to confirm their table at _Ren_ _ée’s_ \- French, distressingly exclusive, but nothing he can’t weasel his way into - to scout their mark at his socialite daughter’s engagement party.

She’s half tempted to answer with an immediate quip, an estimate on how many maître d _'_ s he’d had to seduce just to snag a table by the restrooms. But she is hard trained, and still wary of her apartment building’s tentative phone line. She’ll let him know what he’d missed later.

“Hello?” she says, uniform.

“ _Schmidt, I am pleased to catch you._ _”_ Rehearsed and formal German, his underlying accent carefully repressed. “ _Turn to page 8 and read to me the figures._ ”

Gaby can’t suppress her smirk. Illya picking her, of all people, to be his backup; to feed him his cover like a peeled grape. Solo would tut if he were here, would never let him live it down. No wonder Illya had called her instead, admittedly the lesser of two evils.

She holds the phone at arm’s length to stretch into the kitchen, where she pinches the newspaper from the table.

“It’s not good news, I’m afraid,” she tells him, slipping easily into her native tongue.

“ _I feared the same. It is today_ _’s paper?_ ”

 She flicks to the stock tables. “Yes. Would you believe it? DAX is down, 1.209.”

“ _DAX is down, 1.209_ ,” Illya recites casually. “ _Isn_ _’t that interesting? Tell me the rest._ ” Under him, she hears the roar of suitcase wheels and international babble, a tannoy barking Russian. An airport, she considers. Perhaps a train station. A public line - anonymity.

There’s some shuffling, the scrawl of pen on paper.

“Are you writing this down, or are you doodling?” she asks.

“ _What is that, Schmidt?_ ”

“Drawing little pictures, appearing to be busy.”

“ _Correct._ ”

Gaby smiles, twirls the cord. She reels off a few more meaningless numbers, abbreviations, yield percentages. Illya repeats them slowly and clearly, dictating to her as if she were his secretary.

She wonders who is listening to him, what he has done to make himself so blatantly un-German that he’d resort to this. It’s clumsy, hurried. Not at all like him. She imagines he’s embarrassed too, hiding his cheeks in the high collar of his coat while some mark of his loiters about, eyeing him.

“Anything else?”

Illya pauses. “ _Thank you._ _I look forward to meeting in Munich on Thursday._ _”_

“Likewise.”

 

-  - -

 

  
Thursdays pass and pass into an entirely new month, fruitless. Each and every time the phone rings she forces herself to push down the hope in her throat. It’s embarrassing, the way she leaps a little to pick up the handset. She has never done this before. She had promised herself that she never would.

One Thursday, Solo remarks on her punctuality; he waits for only two rings before she breathlessly clicks in.

 _“Expecting someone, Teller? No gentleman makes a woman wait by the phone_.”

“It’s nothing,” she says, acerbic. “You happen to call while I’m in the living room. That’s all.”

She hastily encourages him to call tomorrow. She’s about to get in the bath, eat, dry her hair, anything plausible will do. She senses the jest rolling in him, bursting to quiz her on the night’s plans, but she stifles him mid-sentence, keen to clear the line. She’ll make it up to him, as always, later.

Illya doesn’t call.

Lying in bed, she dwells resentfully on whether or not ‘ _Thursday_ ’ had only been his sign off; an embellishment to drop Munich into the picture, to flesh out his meagre attempt at blending in with a buzzword or two. Illya has very few methods of disappearing, looking and occupying space the way he does. It would make sense for him to crouch close to a phone box, hiding among the privacy walls and expect her, a tenuous colleague, to provide emergency backup; a soft, native edge to his military German.

But language tutoring had gotten them into this mess, this flirtation, this edge-of-nothing hope and hesitation. Because they had kissed, once, at her kitchen table, with his language still warm on both their tongues.

Nothing but repetition had filled the room and they were too close, watching one another’s lips to perfect the form, the rolling of R’s, the hissing of T’s, until there was nothing left to do but push into one another and taste, scatter their notes to grab at necks and arms and pull deeper, feel more, breathe it all in. They had broken apart just as suddenly, both breathless, form and pronunciation abandoned; any words they could utter afterwards were thick and tangled, their lips bruised and minds lost.

So they had begun to dare one another. Brushing closely down the halls of HQ, sitting thigh-to-thigh in the backs of cars, darting endless, loaded glances. With no threat of interruption, there was a new fear for the execution of touch, because nothing could stop them if they started. Any proximity had made them jump as briskly as if there were a knock at the door, or a ring of the telephone, though there never, ever was. Those constant, untimely wake-up calls had been all that had ever stopped them. Without them, there were no boundaries. No threat to hold them back. And how far would they go, if they could? 

Now they could touch. Now they could kiss. In private, because they were _In Private_ all the time. When he’d reach up for her in the archives, or when he’d correct her form at the range, it would take no more than a brush up his thigh to conduct the electricity, drink it all up and weaken for it - if only he’d touch back, bravely take her up and finish what they’d started.

At her table he had held her with need, urgency, fear. He had tasted of sweet, black tea.

She should forget it.

\- - -

 **23:13 /** ** _05:13_**  
  
Three generous glasses of chardonnay into a long-forgotten Thursday night, she’s half asleep in the living room when the telephone barks for her attention.

She clambers over the back of the sofa. It’s reflexive. Her body has tuned to this ring now, and she loathes it. She hovers over the phone to let it ring three times cleanly. Even considers letting it ring out. Then, admittedly a little light-headed for the wine -  for the thought of him giving up - resentfully, she answers.

“ _Gaby? I_ _’m sorry for calling so late._ ”

She listens for a moment, considering whether she should forgive him. He hadn’t truly promised anything to her. That’s a deal they have both come to understand, in work and in whatever this is. No promises.

He’s breathing in rhythmic, shallow bursts, held back from the phone but perceivable nonetheless.

“What are you doing?” she asks, suddenly alight.

“ _What do you mean?_ ”

“Where are you?”

“ _A phone booth, Novosibirsk,_ ” he says.

She balks. “What are you doing, Illya?”

“ _I am_ _running_.”

Gaby stares at the wall. She closes her eyes and ducks to sit on her heels, hanging her head to drain her embarrassment. The wine - and it’s the wine that’s done it, pushed this rudeness to the front of her thickening head - rushes her blood to numb her lips, her cheeks, piquing now for her spreading grin. She’s glad he can’t see her, can’t hear her drunken laughter through the palm she has clamped over the handset.

“ _Gaby? Are you there?_ ”

“Running from whom?” she enquires, practised and seamless.

“ _Exercise._ ” He pauses. “ _What did you think I was doing?_ ”

Gaby considers pulling the phone out of the wall, relocating to a village in the Andes. “I meant,” she lies, “what are you doing, calling me at two o’clock in the morning?”

“ _No. It is five o_ _’clock here, in Novosibirsk. I have passed this telephone booth twice. There is nobody here. It makes sense._ ” It’s his Russian instructor’s voice, methodical and precise, slightly impatient. She has missed it. Missed having him repeat words over and over with increasing tenacity, close to her ear at the smallest table she could find.

She plugs her bottle of wine with a strict, nun-like finality. “You’re running in the snow at 5am?”

“ _They have salted the streets. It is not too much. The cold air is pleasant after breaking a sweat._ ”

“I find it hard to believe you have ever broken a sweat.”

“ _I do_ ,” he admits, “ _If I do not pace myself, after several kilometres_.”

“That’s some stamina, Kuryakin.”

He breathes a rare laugh of his; affronted, surprised. She smiles. “ _Are you drinking tonight?_ ”

“Are you wearing little shorts?”

“ _Gaby_.”

“Buy a telephone, Illya.”

After a brief quiet, he sighs. She closes her eyes to it. “ _I am monitored, night and day. I could never—_ ”

“You could fix it.” She traces the geometry of her wallpaper, thinking impulsively of how Illya must look then, all windswept and hot with exertion, fresh and breathless in the cold… “Buy a new telephone, rewire the socket. I could ring twice so that you know it’s me, and you could call me back if you’re alone, once the line is clean. You have your own room?”

“ _Yes,_ _”_ he says, begrudgingly. If he were with her, he would be measuring her in his way. His words are weighted again; purposeful, vetted closely for her consumption, “ _What will we talk about?_ ”

“Whatever you want.” Gaby lets it rest in the air. She listens to him pushing another coin into the slot. “Think about it.”

“ _I will_.”

“You will think about it?”

“ _I will buy a telephone._ ”

\- - -

 

Two weeks later, Gaby accepts a brown padded envelope. The neat hand gives it away immediately; square, poker-straight. Illya to the last letter.

It’s disguised as something pedestrian, unremarkable. How had he managed to send uninterrupted mail from the USSR to Britain? There is no regional postage stamp, no return address. The processed ink stamp covers the most incriminating evidence; marring any obvious Cyrillic requesting air mail, first priority, fragile handling. This little thing has slipped right under noses, passed by disinterested eyes, and fallen right into her hands. A forbidden little thing. Promising.

Illya has sent her a telephone line insulator, and a tightly folded note of step-by-step instructions.

\- - -

 

**17:41 / _23:41_**

“You remember my address,” she accuses, when he finally calls to confirm the arrival.

“ _Of course._ ”

“ _‘Sincerely, Sergei Ivanov’_. How sentimental.”

“ _You remember him,_ ” Illya returns. “ _For this, we are even_.”

Gaby straightens a magazine on her sideboard, twists it askew again. “You must have very sordid intentions to secure my line.”

“ _Necessary precaution_.”

“So, you will tell me all of your secrets now?”

“ _What would you like to know?_ ”

She thinks: _everything, everything. What will you give me?_

“What is ‘thank you’ in Russian?” she asks instead, because it is a safe thing to say.

“ _Spa-see-ba,_ _”_ he enunciates flatly, because he has taught her this many, many times.

 She echoes it poorly, thrills for his sigh.

“ _Keep trying._ ”

“And ‘I miss you’?”

A long quiet.

“ _Master your basics,_ _”_ he says, but he soon softens. “ _I miss you, as well._ ”

 

\- - -

 **18:36 /** **_00:36_ **

“ _So for this I must improve my time. My laps are steady, but there is room for improvement. I have four days._ _”_

“This is where your Khrushchev invests in Russia? KGB play time?”

 _“Physical aptitude tests,_ ” Illya corrects, again. “ _Very important._ ”

“What more could you possibly have to prove to them?”

“ _I must maintain what is expected. It is needed. I have been made fat by Cowboy_ _’s cooking._ ”

Gaby smiles, switches the phone from one ear to the other. “What did you eat for dinner?”

 _“Stew, from canteen._ ”

“I’m so sorry.”

“ _It was beef. It was not so bad._ ”

“Beef, hm?” Gaby tuts, rinses her plate. “Sure.”

“ _They would lie about this?_ _”_ He’s defensive, indignant. _“KGB eat better than UNCLE. Here: full, hot meals. There: wet sandwiches, biscuits. Lazy._ ”

“I had a sandwich for dinner.”

“ _That is different._ _You make good sandwiches. Dark bread, meats, cheeses. Ok._ ”

“Thank you so much.”

“ _Make stew tomorrow._ ”

She hums, staring into the glint of her knife. “No.”

“ _You cannot live on your sandwiches_ , _your sausages._ ” Such venom. “ _It is getting cold._ ”

“Nobody in London dies for a lack of ‘beef’ stew.”

“ _Have Solo make you stew._ ”

“Then I will get fat, too.”

“ _Good, for the cold. You are so small._ ”

“Now I see,” she says, plunging her hands into the basin. “ _This_ is why you have sent me this contraption. So I can't record your harassment, have you disciplined by Waverly.”

“ _That is not why._ ”

“Then for what?”

“ _To speak with you like this. Like we are both in your kitchen,_ _”_ he says, and then, immediately: _“Or at HQ. In the car, so on.”_

Like that she can taste sweet black tea, feel his hands on her as if they’d never left. Her Russian notes, dotted very rarely with his own hand to correct her, are stuffed in a file somewhere in her bedroom, not strewn over the square of her Formica table. Just a few inferior, western sandwich crumbs sit there now. But the little room is still weighted and full with him, just the same.

“I wish you were in my kitchen.”

“ _So do I,_ _”_ Illya says, gently. Then, _“I would_ make _you eat stew._ ”

 

\- - -

 **21:48  /** **_00:48_ **

“So you _don_ _’t_ take communal showers?”

“ _Gaby,_ _”_ he says, and it’s an ageing rebuke. “ _I have an apartment._ ”

“Don’t take this from me.”

 _“Sorry._ ”

Gaby lies on the floor of her living room. Illya has returned to Moscow, back to just three short, merciful hours ahead. Halving the distance between them feels like a gentle brush of hands. They have synchronised their long-distance delay, speaking in turns like a two-man saw at the same tree. It is a rhythm they have come to know.

She can’t guess how he’s secured his line. She has no idea how the cork-shaped insulator he’d sent her works, either, but she had followed his neat little instructions. He has, of course, already explained it to her twice, but her confidence as a mechanic rarely crosses with his experience in tech; all wires and switches and circuits - no wrenches, no valves, no oil. She imagines Illya hunching over his desk, fiddling with impossibly tiny mechanisms and knowing fully how they work, how to manipulate them. They ought to swap hands, she thinks, but in spite of all his bodily force Illya is still built for intricacy, and she for pulling things apart. It is only fair to level their physicality out a little, cosmically, to make things harder for them both.

“ _Stop thinking of showering men,_ ” he says.

“I wasn’t.”

“ _Then what is it you are thinking of?_ ”

“You,” she says, and immediately clenches her palms, presses her lips hard. It had fallen out thoughtlessly and easily enough, but her throat feels odd, her chest shallow. “I think about you a lot.”

“ _I think about you too._ ”

Gaby idly presses her fingers to the pulse point in her neck, breaking a circuit of her own. “When?”

“ _When I can_. _Off-duty, sometimes on. At night._ ”

“At night.”

“ _Yes._ ”

She hums, covering up the strange pull in her. The nervous laughter.

“ _Do you_ _…?_ ” He can’t say it. It’s stuck in his throat too, the need to know. It’s endearing. But admitting it is to pluck a brick out from this wall, to see each other’s hands for the first time, reach through to touch.

She stares at the ceiling, overwhelmed. “I think of myself all the time,” she tries lightly.

“ _Gaby._ _”_

“Yes,” she confesses, and it’s surreal and frightening, but it’s true. “I think of you. At night.”

Illya hums back, deep and low. She wants to feel it.

The quiet is heavy. This is far more terrifying in practice. She wonders if he feels the trepidation stinging through him, as it does her; all shark infested waters, all crouching with a shielded head. She hopes so. Hopes that maybe she only feels it because he’s beading it down the line to her.

“I think—” she starts.

“ _You don_ _’t ha_ —”

“What?”

“ _Sorry. What did you say?_ ”

“You could tell me,” Gaby says, before she can stop herself. It’s dark, filled with something like a dare. _“_ Tell me what it is you think of. Or I could tell you. If you want.”

A long, deathly quiet. She barely breathes. The telephone cradle rests on the flat of her stomach, where she watches it shiver with her pulse in all the stillness.

“ _I would like that._ ” Entirely even, unreadable. Of course.

“Ok,” she exhales. “Alright. Let me—” she doesn’t finish, only brings herself to sit up. She picks up the phone and carries it, kicking the tangling cable with her as she goes to her bedroom, just a few steps away.

“ _Where are you going?_ ”

“Where do you think?” she says, and listens closely as he settles down himself. “Are you not in bed at this time?”

“ _I am on it_ ,” he confirms, with military clarity.

She closes her door with her heel, pulling the cable through with her. “Is it comfortable?”

“ _It is serviceable._ ”

“I expected as much.”

“ _Yours?_ ”

“Yes. A hundred pillows, at least.”

He tuts gravely. “ _Bad for posture._ ”

“Illya.” She flops down, and she knows he can hear the duvet crackle, thickly feathered for winter. Her heart still races. She stifles her urge to hum through the silence he’s left her in yet again. “What are you thinking about?”

“ _Being there,_ ” he says, almost immediately. She imagines he flushes for it, as his voice quietens a little. “ _Gaby. What do you look like now?_ ”

“Are you asking me what I’m wearing?”

“ _That, too_.”

“I am dressed for bed.”

“ _Your pyjamas? The blue ones?_ ”

She considers embellishing the truth. Lingerie. Perhaps nothing at all. She doesn’t. She has spent the whole day lying, and has already closed the door behind it. “The same.”

Illya hums, pleased. “ _I miss them._ ”

“Really?” she tilts her chin down and twists one of the buttons, thinking them plain. How like him to romanticise cotton; the chaste and utilitarian.

“ _You often wear them when I think of you_ ,” he admits, and although she had anticipated something like it, it still manages to spread a thrill through her, makes something young and red flutter in her chest. “ _Your hair?_ ”

“Ponytail,” she says, and pulls it over her shoulder as if he could possibly see. “And you? Stockings, garters?”

 _“Of course. All the division sleeps like this._ ”

“Communally?”

“ _How else?_ ”

Gaby catches the tail-end of his smirk, affecting his voice with a sleepy warmth she wants to kiss from him. Every smile she has ever pulled from him is a prize, and this is no different. Her nerves melt. It is only Illya, she reminds herself, with a pleasant heaviness sinking through her. There is nothing to fear.

“ _Undershirt, pyjama pants,_ _”_ he confesses.

“That’s nice,” she says gently, and she means it. “Your hair?”

“ _A mess_.”

Gaby hums, and he hums back. She strains to hear the rustle of his sheets as he shifts down. For a long while, they are quiet, getting used to this.

“Illya,” she says, finally, strengthened by her power to hang up and hide if she must: “what do we do when you think of me?”

Slow, quiet. “ _You want to know._ ”

“Yes.”

“ _Well,_ ” he begins, searching for the words. “ _You kiss me._ ”

“Oh?” It’s more than she had expected from him.

“ _You are on top_ ,” he assures her formally, before pausing for a moment. “ _On top of me. We_ _’re on the floor. You know. As it goes. As it has gone before._ ”

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

“ _Gaby—_ ”

“Am I straddling you, Illya?”

In all his determined silence, a slight sigh betrays him. “ _You are._ ”

“You think of our first night together.”

“ _Yes. All the time._ ”

“What could have happened, do you think?”

“ _Anything,_ _”_ he breathes. _“Anything you wanted, Gaby._ ”

Heat creeps up her chest, settling high on her cheeks. “Illya?”

“ _Da?_ ”

“Are you touching yourself now?”

Another of his cut swallows, a shift of his sheets. Low, so deep and tired: “ _Is that all right?_ ”

“ _God_ , Illya,” she manages, losing her senses. It is all right. She’d expected a marathon, a series of magic words to get him like this. But now all of Illya’s weight is reclining, so _much_ of him leaning up against the headboard, all sleepy and open and working himself to the thought of her already.

She wants to hear him.

“ _Sorry, I—_ _”_

“No,” Gaby hurries, shuffling down. She tucks the phone between her ear and her shoulder, toys anxiously with the bow at her waist. “No, it’s fine. It's… that's good. For me.”

“ _Really?_ ” he murmurs, almost amused. He takes it like ammunition, a promise for another time. “ _Are you, now?_ ”

“Not yet.”

“ _Perhaps you should._ ”

“I might,” she says distantly. “You were thinking of being here. First. Before. So, what would you do?”

“ _I am there?_ ” Illya thinks on this, makes her wait. She traces the skin under the hem of her nightshirt, ticklish and impatient. Hesitance, calculation, as much a part of him as his good manners, his volatility. If his agreement to listen to her was a blessing, his sudden participation is a miracle. She wonders if he’s perhaps a little drunk, too.

“ _Maybe_ _I would catch you like this,_ _”_ he says slowly, testing. His voice is a gift to her, dark and torn. _“You are too lost to send me out.”_

“I am,” she says, and it’s true. “If I invited you in...?”

“ _What do you want?_ ”

Gaby shifts, suddenly aware of every inch of her body. She reaches down in surrender. “Touch me,” she says, as evenly as she can.

“ _Where?_ ”

“Everywhere, Illya. Just put your hands on me.”

“ _I want to,_ ” he confesses, a new pull in his throat. “ _I want you._ ”

“You can have me.”

“ _I want to be there_ ,” he goes on. “ _Feeling you, ready_.”

“Ready?” she presses, but she knows.

Illya says, with the thick weight of a curse, “ _Ready for me._ ” 

Gaby’s gaze rolls up to the ceiling. Admitting it all in a tone he reserves for pleasantries... It works for her, and he is a fortune teller; she _is_ ready. Shamefully so. She frowns for the quickness of it, having surprised herself.

Illya has stopped, but she keeps going, working herself to the thought. She pictures his mouth forming a moan, his cheekbones a little flushed for it. She wants his stubbled jaw, to part his lips with her tongue and taste the boyish guilt in him again. Feel his strong groan sink into her chest, humming over her hips, have him mouth it between her thighs, teeth and tongue and breath and— 

“ _Gaby?_ ” he says then, tearing her back with that same voice, unfathomably deep, a little pained.

“What?” she hisses.

“ _I said I want to taste you, too._ _”_

Raw heat rushes through her, molten and deep. She has been _talking_?

“Oh.”

“ _Is that alright?_ ”

She breathes a heady laugh. “I should think so.”

“ _Good._ _”_

“Illya,” she begins, then falters. Drawing attention to this deviation of his is to risk him snapping back to propriety. But her concern is fleeting; he swallows a gentle moan with just the sound of his name on her tongue, so she considers him lost enough to risk it.  “You surprise me. I didn’t know you had this in you.”

“ _You have never asked._ _”_

“Perhaps I should get to know you better.”

“ _When I come home, you will._ ”

“Home?”

A long, heavy stillness. “ _You understand._ ”

Gaby nods uselessly into the phone. She catches his slight groan through a stretch, a stifled yawn. She tries to hide her disappointment. “You’re tired.”

“ _It is one o_ _’clock in the morning_.”

“Are you still…?” she tries, pushing down the dizzying thought for a moment, just to get it out of her. “Have you, already?”

“ _No. Do you want me to?_ ”

“Yes.”

“ _Then let me listen to you,_ ” he tells her, as hushed as a secret. “ _Think of us. Let me hear you finish._ ”

Gaby flushes, straightens up. How does it work like that, his voice setting everything alight? Illya’s rare confessions pour steadily over her now, and that’s what does it; she’d believed she would have to battle, draw blood from a stone. But she has him in her palms now, his cooperation running over, hot and red and impossible at her command. This bewildering power she has over him. Too much.

“Fine,” she says, a little defensive. She can’t place why.

Gaby focuses her touch, already close after this long, charged game. She tends to come quietly when she’s alone. For her neighbours or for herself, for her embarrassment or out of habit, she doesn’t know. But she tries to let go now. She opens up to breathe gently into the phone as if it were his mouth, letting him taste the gasps he’s begging to pull from her - _would_ pull from her, if he were here. _Oh_ , she sighs, finding something bright and hot. She _really_ wishes he was.

She smooths one hand between her thighs, draws the other over her body as if they are both his, exploring, pressing. He is rough where it counts, gentle where she needs it — she bucks instinctively into thin air and she _needs_ the weight of him, muscle and skin over her and between her, firm and heated. Almost nothing else would do. If she can’t have him, she would only have to hear him…

But his breathing comes through the phone like a ghost, barely a whisper. She fights to feel it whole and hot over her, brushing over her ear and coaxing her to shiver. His mouth, his _tongue_ , his teeth at her neck - his voice rumbling there to ask how much she wants it, how it feels —  whatever she wants, he will do it, sealing the deal with the warm spread of his lips, gripping at her thighs,  taking—

“Y _ou are close?_ ” Illya asks, thick with need, gritted. It’s enough to make her arch up, try harder; meeting the raw pull in his voice and hiding from it too, to sink back into the dream, coming quietly - twice, if she can, and she believes she will try - before he would even know.

“Yes,” Gaby manages, edging the phone into the crook of her neck and fast unravelling. “I need… _mein Gott_ , Illya, I— You’re— Illya, you should be here, doing this to me.”

It’s all she can offer but he groans hard, and the sound is a magnet, pulling heat all the way through her with a snap. Just hearing him grow shameless fills her with something powerful and electric, dissolving everything but the rolling heat.

“ _Say that again._ ”

“Illya,” she starts, and it’s precious, the broken moan that escapes him for his name on her.  “You’ve done this to me. You have… You need to feel this.” Her nerves are lost causes, streaking and bursting hot. “I need you, your mouth to — _fuck_ — Say something, Illya, please say something—”

He almost _growls_ , melting into a plea of his own like nothing she’s ever heard. She pictures the rise and fall of his chest and, like muscle memory, she stretches to meet it.

Gaby lets him hear the break in her voice, his name barely forming in her throat. He reels in her head; flashes of muscle and weight with his hands spread over her; real flesh and heat and touch, teasing her waist and her hips and her breasts until she feels everything so minutely. She knows Illya’s hands; memorised every thrill for his palm spanning her waist to tug her away, or even closer, undercover. How firm he is. How skilled, how determined, how _precise_. She has thought of them on her like this before, alone, keening for it to be real again — only he _knows_ now, because she has told him, and he’s straining for her too, and can hear her coming apart at the seams for him.

She arches up with a strange high cry, hitting something sweet.

“ _Gaby_ ,” he manages, because he must; “ _You sound beautiful._ ”

“ _Fuck—_ _”_ she shifts, and the clammy heat of her skin becomes a film covering every inch. “Is that the b-best you can do? Polite. Proper.”

“ _I enjoy hearing you. I wonder, will you be this way when I am with you? Will you be louder?_ ”

“Ah, _”_ Gaby breathes, trying to maintain her rhythm. “That’s confident.”

“ _Quieter,_ ” he confirms, almost to himself. “ _We would be kissing._ ”

“You think of kissing like this?”

“ _You do not?_ ”

Gaby smiles helplessly, sinks so far down the mattress she’s off the pillows. “Well, I am _now_.”

“ _Good._ ”

“Are you _good_ , Illya?” she asks, growing mindless again for that deep, rare praise of his. How she wishes to hear something terrible come out of him, something raw and depraved. But Illya thinks of kissing and keeps the rest to himself, and that swells up in her chest; a different kind of need, something that certifies, amplifies. When he’s finally by her ear, his lips warm and his hands grasping, she’ll tear profanities out of him if she has to. And she’ll revel in that sweetness soon after.

“ _I know what you want,_ ” Illya says, and she can feel that smirk three whole hours away. “ _I know you would not fear to tell me, to demand performance. We would be very good together. I look forward to it._ _”_

Gaby bucks up again, desperate. She risks becoming too sensitive for drawing it out like this. She focuses, listens to his breathing; longer inhales, broken stutters, but he is far behind her. She’s gone, with the feel of him materialising stronger now, warm and heavy all over her.

“Illya, please— _Ich brauche_ _… du sollst... Fuck!_ ” Gaby grabs her sheets, straining up to meet him where he isn’t with a shameful little noise, aching for it.

Illya moans then, low and crackling — and like that, all this swelling heat tenses through her thighs as she comes, hard, deep, slow. It thrums in waves; a smooth, heavy current.

She flattens her free palm over her eyes and slows her working hand to soothe herself, bring herself back. She knows _nothing_ of what she’s said, though her throat feels so worked for having let it out. Babbling, moaning, confessing. She hopes it wasn’t too much; he could have dragged any secret out of her in that state, compromised the world if she told him all she knew. It's possible she already had.

“It is my turn to hear you, now?” she murmurs dizzily, barely remembering to right the phone at her ear.

Illya gives a grunt of a laugh that makes her jump. “ _It will not be a long one_.”

Gaby hums. She is content to listen to him; his cut off groans and hitching swallows, as if forgetting how to breathe. She is still catching her breath herself, lips unkissed and numb, desperate for something she needs but isn’t there to be given to her.

“What am I doing now?” she asks, pleading for a distraction.

“ _You—_ ” he clears his throat suddenly, strains to try again. “ _Against the wall, hard._ ”

“You are so far gone,” she says indulgently, willing down the twinge in her thighs, stirring impossibly all over again. “Is it good?”

“ _Bozhe moi, Gaby. Do not make me talk like this._ ”

She smiles, lazy and content. She closes her eyes. “You sound good.”

“ _So do you. The sounds you make... This_ _… This is so…_ ”

“So…?” to keep him talking could pull her back to the brink again, needing like this. She rolls to one side, presses her knees together.

“ _So much. Too much_.”

“I hope your wall is comfortable.”

A relenting breath of a laugh. “ _You are warming to it._ _”_

How close they’d been to this, wrapped up and exhausted for fighting. She already knows, just as well as she’d known his hands and his mouth at her kitchen table, how he feels between her thighs, solid and strong, both on the floor and standing tall. How gentle, dutiful. He’d be that and more now; all stamina and wanting, and a stronger force still is in his belief that this is what’s needed; that, because he is Illya, it will be nothing but the very best, and he’ll do it well or not at all.

_“I need to see you.”_

Gaby smiles.

 _“I will come back. I need you. Now. After… To feel this, taste—”_ the phone crackles with his firm exhale, straight into her ear. _“I think of you all the time.”_

“Is this a love letter, Sergei?”

A warm huff, relieved. _“Let me hear you.”_

“I want to do this to you,” Gaby offers easily, because it’s the truth. It’s the truest thing she’s said all day. “I would love to see you like this, Illya.”

He sighs, hums. All those miles away, thinking of her; thinking of taking her against a wall _,_ and then of simply kissing her. She’s sure the sight is perfect too; losing himself, eyes closed and body tensing, weakening. The rarest sight on earth.

“Illya,” she says, with very real feeling. “Illya, come back. For you to be here now and to touch you, have you touch me? I could come again just for _thinking_ of you like this.”

She’s followed by a broken string of Russian. He groans and she hears him move, a jolt. Yes, she’d possibly kill to see this herself, draw it all out of him. And then he falls apart, his last grunt muffled by something — his own palm? She thrills for that, and she groans into the pillow with need too, with how big this bed feels with only one in it, and pictures him there instead, sheened and sated and exhausted and panting, just as he does now down the phone; rapidly, shamefully.

“ _Gaby?_ ” he breathes.

“Yes?”

“ _Thank you._ ”

She nearly laughs aloud; he’s mindless like this. “Thank _you_.”

She could sleep now, easily, with the phone tucked between her cheek and the pillow, and her arm spread out over the cool mattress. She longs for him to slip under her there, solid and safe, to wrap her up and breathe everything he’d just told her all over again, on a loop, a record that never wears out.

“Hmm,” she says, eventually, but Illya doesn’t reply. “Illya.”

“ _Hm._ ”

“This call must have cost you many, many roubles.”

“ _Does not matter_. _Go to sleep._ ”

“Dream of kissing me.”

“ _As if I have choice._ ”

“You don’t?”

Illya yawns, groans pleasantly into a stretch. “ _Not for many, many months. Most distracting. Certainly, you have stolen seconds from my lap time._ ”

Gaby smirks, warming. “And just what would I do with those?”

“ _Collect them, weaken me. Have me sent back to London for poor performance_. _It is sneaky, clever. Something you would do._ ”

“Sounds more like a plan. A suggestion.”

“ _Perhaps,_ _”_ he offers. _“I would like to be with you there.”_

Gaby glances at the pillow, imagining his messed hair there, and all the rest of him. “I would like that, too.”

“ _Not long. Two months, maximum._ ”

“Too long.”

“ _I know._ _”_

“I will eat stew if you come back sooner.”

“ _We agreed,_ _”_ he says, very seriously, _“No promises._ ”

“I would never betray your love of stew.”

“ _No. That is not what I meant._ ”

“I know,” she says, sleepily. “I know what you meant.”

_“Good. I will try to call tomorrow.”_

_“_ What will we talk about? _”_ she echoes, her impression of him dire.

“ _Chess._ ”

“Of course.”

 _“Goodnight, Gaby._ ”

 _“_ Goodnight, Sergei.”

She catches only a huff of his laugh before he quietly cuts out.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Illya returns, and Gaby has her fair share of hiding to do.

  **21:08 / _00:08_**

“Monday,” Gaby repeats. 

“ _Yes._ ” 

“Then I suppose I should make a start on that stew,” she says, as lightly as she can. She clutches the phone tighter to stifle the new restlessness stringing through in her hands. “I know your people enjoy leaving things to pickle.” 

“ _No stew. I have surprise for you._ ” 

“A surprise.”  

“ _A good one._ ” 

“You hope.” 

Illya is quiet for a moment. “ _Yes. I hope. For you to receive poor gift is worse than to deny you one.”_ Another pause. _“I will be armed when I give it to you._ ” 

“Steady, Illya. Anybody listening might think you have something to lose.” 

“ _Precaution_.” 

“I’d like to boil precaution. Make a stew of it.” 

“ _I know.”_ He hesitates. _“May I visit you? Seven o’clock. After work, when I return._ ”

“After work?” At night, she thinks, and balks. Gaby stares at her living room, daunting now with the notion that he might eventually be standing in it, enormous and surveying it in his way.  

“ _Yes. Monday,”_ he says. _“If you want_.” 

“Fine.” 

“ _Good._ ” 

“Call me tomorrow,” she detracts hurriedly, twisting her bracelets around and around. “I want to hear all about this new agent of yours.” 

He shrinks. “ _I will not speak to you of work_.” 

“Unprofessional.” 

“ _Very._ ” 

“Classified? Your training of this... redhead?” 

“ _Blonde_.” 

“Huh. Then certainly I am doomed.” 

He huffs through his nose. “ _I think not_.” 

“Well, I hope not.” 

“ _I can promise you this much_.” 

“No promises.” 

“ _No. No promises_.”  

She hopes he is smiling too, for this tiny, dangerous lie. 

 

\- - - 

 

**19:32 / _22:32_**

At her insistence, he’d been haltingly confessing last night’s dream. He’d asked her to fill in the blanks for him; confirm all she’d say, all she’d do if it were real.

Even in his dreams he pinpoints her, has read her like a book, and true, he knows what she wants. She allows him to be cautious, embarrassed; hearing him struggle to convey his funny little fantasies – typically staid, soviet in how little he asks of her, how guilty he is to be offered too much – has only confirmed that, yes, she’d want any and all of it. She’d do that for him, with him, let him do it for her. Has she thought of this, that? No, but she will now. 

After an unsubtle gasp escaped her, he’d finally asked: _are you...?_ Hunting for a modest manner of asking her, despite everything that has already transpired: _Are you, now?_ A slew of difficulty, afraid to be wrong, but he wasn’t. He’d taken her confession as permission to join her, as they have just once before. 

Until he, and Gaby too, heard the urgent hammering of his apartment door.

He hissed that he’d call back.  

Wait for him.   

So now Gaby is squirming, on edge and deciding, twenty minutes after being left cold, whether she should finish by herself. Aim for twice? Leave the binds of her stuffed bed and take a long shower instead? Or only lie back and think on how surreal this all is; how improbable and wrong and exciting, how doomed it is to fail? 

When finally he returns, Gaby forces herself to wait for three clean rings before picking up. 

“What took you so long? I was ready to finish myself off,” she says, German, pushing her fingers through her hair. 

“ _Gaby. Have you been a bad girl?_ ” 

Her heart is in her throat, followed closely by her stomach.  

“ _You were ready to finish yourself off?_ ” he prompts, echoing her.  

“Huh. I thought you were my landlord,” she replies coolly, if a little brittle, in English. “Finish my shelf off. We're hanging shelves.” 

“ _You are a very poor liar._ ” 

There is nothing Gaby Teller wouldn’t give to pull every word she has ever uttered back into her mouth and swallow them whole. She would never return to HQ, never use a telephone ever again, if she had her way. She has had her way for a long time. Almost two months, purely her own indulgence on this tainted little device. Perhaps it is time to pack up and leave for the Andes. No phones up there.  

“ _You’re waiting._ ” 

“For what?” 

“ _For Peril._ ” Solo tuts. This consummate intruder, the cat that got the cream. “ _You’ve been making illicit calls._ ” 

Gaby pulls a hideous face. “How _dare_ you? What do you think I am?” 

“ _Well, hopefully you’re insulated. One loose word on a Kraut and a Ruskie hissing down the phone and you’ll be in Prison Holloway by morning._ ” 

“And I’m certain being an operative for the crown won’t help me at all.” 

 _“So you confess to your crimes?_ ” 

“Goodbye.” 

“ _Worse than Holloway,_ ” Solo hurries on, “ _would be the wrath of Waverly, called to bail you out. Now, it would be a shame if he were to discover this himself…_ ” 

“Napoleon.” 

“ _Supposing I had some sort of leverage, some form of advantage here, Gaby, if you’ll care to indulge me. Supposing I did—_ ”  

“Have you nearly finished? I’m a very busy woman.” 

“ _I’m sure,_ ” he drawls. “ _Plenty of shelves to hang. My first question: what’s he into? Now, I feel like he’s a 7pm, week-nightly missionary man. Shower first — separately, obviously. Under the sheets, no talki—_ ”  

Gaby hangs up.  

Before she can finish snapping her knuckles, shaking out her nerves, the telephone rings again. The sour rumble of her anxiety heightens in her stomach. 

“What?” she hisses.  

“ _Do you greet all your callers so salaciously, or only me?_ ” 

“I’ll skin you.” 

“ _Gaby, I care for you a great deal._ " She says nothing. “ _I imagine that’s his most devilish input, anyway. The cad._ ” 

“Ah,” Gaby says, teeth gritted. “That’s my landlord now.” 

“ _So you’re into role play_.” 

 “Never call me again.” 

“ _Noted._ ” He pauses for a moment, shuffling his deck. “ _Now hold on, Gabriella Teller… You’ve cut me off for every telephone call I’ve ever paid to you. I’m a colleague, a man of his word — a companion, just doing his very best to grace your — frankly, tragic — social calendar with his presence. Gaby?_ ” 

“Stop this.” 

“ _You’d rather hear Peril stutter at you than accept my invitation to Soho? How long have you been keeping this up?_ ”  

She twists the cord, the little silver insulator hanging like a plumb bob, weighing her down. She can almost hear the grin cracking his cheeks in two. It certainly lends a proud lilt to his voice.  

“ _You tearaway. You little tinker._ ” 

“What are you talking about?” 

“ _Don’t play coy_.” 

“What do you want, Solo? To upset me?” 

“ _Oh, Gaby, of course not_.” 

“Then what?” 

“ _I am merely encouraging you to be careful._ ” 

“Well don’t. Illya hasn’t called me in months.” 

“ _Really?_ ” he holds something in. She can feel it, boiling over. Perhaps a boast that he’s had two calls for himself. Two calls Illya has already detailed to her; following up on the import of a particular vodka, and confirming Solo’s sizing for and a pair Russian leather gloves he’d coveted. Still, amidst all his joy for being The Favourite, he softens a little. “ _Everything alright, Gaby?_ ” 

“Fine.”  

“ _Come out to dinner with me tonight._ ” 

Would she wait any longer? The idea of being interrogated by Napoleon in public, as much as she cares for him, makes her wish for some form of horrible emergency or scantily clad neighbour of his to tear him away from the phone, distract him with something more enticing than, well, this little morsel he’s been waiting for all his life.  

Not likely. 

“Really, Solo, that’s very… sweet of you, but—” 

“ _It’s my pleasure._ ” 

“And mine, too. But really, I’d like to go to bed.” 

“ _I had no idea you were so easy_.” 

“Ah. There it is.” 

“ _Then I suppose I’ll see you at work_.” 

“Why did you call me?” 

“ _Dinner._ ” 

“Oh, Solo,” she coos vindictively. “Did your date cancel?” 

He pauses. “ _That’s not important._ ” 

 - - - 

 

When Monday comes, it crawls slower than any shift at the garage, any fruitless stakeout for UNCLE. At HQ, she is regularly accosted by Solo for staring into space, for crumpling the hem of her skirt in both clammy palms.   

 After the knock at his door, Illya hadn’t called back. Not that night, and not all week thereafter. And Gaby knows it’s pathetic to wait by the phone, so she’d decided not to.

She drank, read, listened to records, and left the telephone very well alone. But all this cautious distance hasn't revealed who could possibly have come to his door, or what they had heard, or what they had done to him once he’d greeted them in the dead of night.  

Illya doesn’t return on Monday, nor on Tuesday. And who can she ask? She isn’t supposed to know a thing. Like the rest of UNCLE, she should assume he won’t return at all, with Agent Kuryakin just the very same brand of temporary as the tens of other agents for hire. Objectively, she has met and forgotten scores of men like him. As a professional with strict repercussions against fraternisation —  _especially_ with Russia’s one token of trust — Gaby’s concern is forbidden, likely treasonous.   

So she cannot ask Waverly.

She will not ask Solo.  

She has thrown her cards on the table — made her two-ring cold calls, waited for him to return them — but she will not to push him. She can only wait.

Their profession’s justification for prolonged silence is in quick and quiet elimination. 

 She doesn’t like to think of that.  

 

\- - - 

 

Three days later, and through the warped, frosted glass of Waverly’s visitor’s office, she spots the back of a neat blond head.  

Waverly has not spotted her. She is sure of this, because the second she registers what she’s looking at Gaby falls into a squat. She continues this way beneath the window line, crouched low and glancing behind her, until she crushes face-to-hip with none other than Napoleon Solo, the very last man she wants to see. 

“You’re walking better these days,” he says, peering down at her.

“What are _you_ doing here?” 

He gestures to himself, to the switchboard room doors behind him. Sent out by the girls inside. Again. “How about you? Your first heist, or merely your worst?” 

She stands too straight, shifts the forgotten files in her arms. “Work,” she says pointedly. 

“Ah.” He smirks. 

“What?” 

“You’ve come to ogle Peril.” 

“Illya is back?”  

Napoleon frowns. “To think, I once thought you to be a particularly skilled liar.” 

She glares dully before skirting around him to pad down the hall. If she can come up with a retort, it’s already too late. Late like everything else.

And that’s it, the reason she can’t keep a twist off her lips, has a new little bubble of air in her lungs; Illya’s not missing, dead, worse - unless he’s only been very well propped up in that chair. Here, it would only half surprise her.

Truly, she ought to have known. If Illya would let anybody retire him, it would be Solo, unquestionably, and so by now she would already know; the American couldn't keep a boast like that to himself even if he wanted to.

But what next, now that Illya is here? Is she expected to look him in the eye? Have him hear her without static, delay? His voice with its deep, raw rumble, no insulator to dilute it —

“Love our little chats, Gaby."

She sends him a one-handed pleasantry. 

 

\- - -

 

He’s on Waverly’s heels when they pause outside her office door.

Illya tactfully neglects to look in, but Waverly does, gesturing at whom they are about to greet — Kuryakin’s former partner, Gaby Teller, bodily present in her office where she ought to be, but what’s this? Her head is a thousand miles deep in the sand, and her pulse is useless, stuttering like a worn out needle. And doesn’t she look like an idiot now, staring at the wall with a coffee cup hanging from her ring finger? 

Gaby flits her eyes back to her paperwork. Reports, loggings, inventory, armoury and apparel forms. Engrossing. It’s not as if she has spent the past hour dwelling on how Illya will be returning to his empty desk across the room in no time at all, and that the meddling Napoleon Solo is still nowhere to be found. Like a spider, it is more disconcerting not to see Solo than to have him in plain sight. She could use his effortless diffusing; craves his ease. More pressingly, however, she needs his ignorance while she braves the thought of looking Illya in the face, or even shaking his hand, after — 

“Gaby?” Waverly says, and she can tell it’s not the first time because his brow is furrowed, and his bottom teeth are showing in all his exasperation.  

“Yes?” 

“Good morning,” says Illya, and she looks all the way up to find him there too, unavoidable, with just as many limbs as he has always possessed. There goes his excuse.  

He holds his hand over her desk. Of course. Gaby steels herself and stands to shakes it, her chin tilted a little.  

“You seem surprised,” he encourages. 

Oh. “I am.” She looks away, relieved for the opportunity: “Waverly?” 

“Apologies, Agent. The whole ordeal has been terribly up in the air, and a dreadful distraction.”  He waves it off.  “I did attempt contact shortly after receiving the news; go about preparing an impromptu meeting, reconvene with the three of you and so on, but your personal telephone seems to be perpetually engaged of late. Any trouble with the line? I can have the team take a look.” 

Gaby’s smile is waxen. She feels Illya’s heavy gaze melting into the crown of her head. 

“No, sir.” 

“Right,” Waverly says. He brushes a scrutinous eye over them both. “I suppose I ought to wrangle Solo.” 

“No need,” comes a call from the doorway, where Napoleon leans. “Morning, Peril. Gaby.” 

“Cowboy.” 

He beams his dimpled smirk, and Gaby thinks she’ll go blind for it. She turns to pick up her coffee, stirs the dregs with something that feels dreadfully rehearsed; so far from natural she’d be more inconspicuous if she poured it down herself instead. 

When she dares another glance at Illya, he is measuring Napoleon with his hands held tightly behind his back, flexing there, burned. Her own hand is still bloodless with the weight of his handshake, though she knows that to be ridiculous, prudish.  

How had she ever…? She can’t even think it. Not while he stands there, very tangible now, close enough to reach out and touch, and with two very real ears on both sides of his head, at least one of which has heard _everything_. 

Illya catches her eye over the white rim of her mug, drops it. 

“I’d say this calls for celebration,” Napoleon declares, and Waverly pinches the bridge of his nose. 

 

\- - -

 

Gaby peers around Solo’s proud, blue shoulders to take in the lounge. She’d believed he’d run out of places to impress her. The choice is intimidatingly modern, every surface coated in lacquer, black gloss, brushed gold. The music is gentle, and the booths are upholstered in plush green velvet, with marble-topped tables lit by shards of amber glass from above. Perhaps he’s been saving the best for last; convinced it’ll be dinner and a show, this uncomfortable dance between his partners. A perfect finale for him, the pervert, both king and jester.  

She holds in another jab on how he’d acquired an invitation to the place; it’s answered very shortly — Napoleon is greeted with a tangerine lipstick kiss on the cheek and a pat on the behind, sent straight to the bar with a wink.  

And very few eyes turn to take them in. Whether it’s because Solo’s a regular or because they are comparatively unremarkable here, Gaby can’t tell; it seems every patron is notable and engaged in mutual society while the three of them, a strange trio of differing silhouette and all the rest, gain no attention whatsoever. Nobodies, masked. A blessing. No wonder Solo lurks here by night.  

“Find a booth,” he says, “I’ll open a tab.  

“I do not like the sound of that,” Illya murmurs, stooping, as she leads him to a bottle-green booth in the far corner.  

“You’ll simply have to control yourself.”  

“That is not what I meant.”  

Hands brush her shoulders to take her coat and she swats at them, flashes her eyes from his to a very temporarily distracted Solo.  

Illya gives her a look. “It would be more incriminating if I did not take your coat.”  

She ignores him, scooting into the booth to lay her coat over her lap. He follows her, uncertain on how much distance to leave between them, and his shoulders begin to hunch.  

“I do not like this.”  

“That does not surprise me at all.”  

He glares at the small, intimate huddles of the room, takes in the ambient chatter. “These civilians look like him. This is American bar?”  

“I imagine they came by their wealth more legitimately.”  

“Not difficult task.” Still, he looks to her, his pressing question unanswered.  

“Just keep your voice down,” she allows. “I would like a night off. No fighting.”  

“No promises.”  

She bites back a smile and pretends to rifle through her purse, desperate for something innocent with which to occupy her hands.   

“I like this dress,” Illya tells her.  

That doesn’t help. “Thank you.”  

“The colour, the cut. It is—”  

“Short?” she offers. Petty vengeance is discouraged in this line of work, but so is everything else she wants from him.  

Illya only smiles, placid. “Courrèges.”  

“And does the KGB appreciate your love of European haute couture?”  

His smile falls into a hard frown, an opening of the mouth to protest.  

“You didn’t call me back,” she reminds him, and regrets it the second it falls off her lips. How young she sounds, how petulant. But a cold shoulder can only take her so far when coaxing Illya to apologise; he seems to enjoy it, the chasing of her forgiveness. She presses her lips together, feels his eyes on her like two bright headlights.  

“Sorry.”  

“You could have said you didn’t want to talk like that anymore.”  

Illya shifts. “That is not why.”  

“Work,” she says, flat.  

“Yes.”  

She nods disinterestedly, glancing instead over the sea of heads. She wants her drink.  

“I enjoyed hearing you,” he confesses, and hurries on, hushed, “talking with you. On the phone.”  

Another vague nod. She plays with her earring.  

Illya sighs hard through his nose, speaks through his teeth, “I left for Novosibirsk, three days. No telephone calls. I wanted to...” He lowers, impossibly, “I thought every night on how rude it had been to have you wait, leave you that way.”  

“Unfinished?” She smiles at him, saccharine.   

His eyes widen only to flit quickly away; Solo has materialised out of nowhere, as is his habit, to flank her right side with a golden tray of tinkling glasses in hand.   

“Apologies for the decadence, Peril,” Napoleon says, as the crystal tumbler is torn from him. He rolls a delighted little glance at Gaby, “But I’d say now is as good a time as any to surrender to indulgence.”   

She does her very best not to upend the tray into his lap, light a match.  

 

\- - - 

 

She’s two icy vodkas and three mint juleps down when the thrum in her legs and the numbing of her hands becomes a very real threat. A threat to reach out and touch, beneath the marble table at this steadily shrinking booth, Illya, who is nursing only his second glass of scotch.  

Solo has evaporated once again, making the rounds of a few acquaintances en route to the bar, perhaps picking a few pockets. Gaby can’t guess. She hasn’t taken her eyes off their booth in a long time, and in particular the spread of thighs next to her. The sluice of ice and mint and expensive bourbon warms her body, makes her a little bit fond of everything in reach, makes touch and movement a very, very welcome thing.   

Gaby, catching herself, blinks hard.  

Napoleon has dragged the two of them here with one intention: to play the wooden spoon, stir the pot and let them fester. She knows this, knew it before they arrived. If Illya does too, he does not protest.  

Meanwhile Solo saunters off elsewhere, peering at them from a distance as he might at exotic birds; something he doesn’t fully understand but finds quite charming. He takes to the rest of the room with the same flippant interest, throwing her the occasional raise of a brow; _how’s it going?_ To this, she sips her drink with two fingers spread on his side of the glass. 

“Gaby.”  

“Mm.”  She’s missed that on him.

“Do you want to go home?”  

She looks at him, perhaps a little dumbly. Strange, the muscle memory for leaning in to hear him again, have the gravel of his voice roll out in low, low waves.  

Fresh air. She needs fresh air. She isn’t drunk, no, but under that honeyed glass and dressed up as he is, _big_ as he is, even sitting, he is not doing her any favours on the professional-countenance front. He makes her forget. He hasn’t shaved since his flight, and the roughness of him hits the light with a speckled lustre she wants to scratch through. She’d like to pull that neckline down, mark him there and hide it just as quick.  

She watches him swallow, knows she’s staring. The fire of bourbon in her stomach warms and subdues.  

“How eager,” she says instead.  

His mouth closes firmly, and Gaby stares at that too for a while. Before long she must meet his eye because he is daring her to, and he resolutely refuses to look away until she does.  

“Wait for Solo,” she relents, so quietly he must lean in beneath the music. “Then walk me home.”  

He nods. “Good.”  

This is not a telephone call. His reactions manifest in detail, full colour and gesture. There are nuances in his bluntness here; that frank communication she’s missed, has only ever found in him in this country of plummy talking-around.  

But it had been easier over the phone. She could confess with all the safety of hanging up and hiding for a week if she wanted to. Insulated, distanced by time and two seas. They have never been in sync; always interrupted, delayed, crackling with distortion and half-utterances and never quite getting it right. Even their kiss had been misaligned, split by a table and botched language, lights on and glaring to show them what they’d done. Merged forcefully, wrongfully, like two repelling magnets. They must always snap apart. It is expected of them.  

Only now his cooperation is touchable, quite literally, and, with lights low and truly off the clock, she could crack against him. She very easily could. Wants to, now. No borders. They share a booth, a language unheard in the intimate anonymity of this place, and in the purposeful, encouraging distance of Solo.   

Illya has heard her at his mercy, an absolute vulnerability she can’t forget, and she can bet the world that he hasn’t forgotten either; sees it in his discreet glances at her hands, at her mouth, just as she does his; memorising, confirming shape and form.   

Solo emerges, drifting steadily and adjusting his suit jacket.  

Illya’s move is calculated, decisive. He slips under the fold of Gaby’s coat on her lap to graze only his knuckles along the outside of her thigh. The velvet dark obscures him, and although the bulk of her silk lined manteau hides the touch, it does nothing to warm the prickling chill he’s raising there.   

He’s staring over the patrons, and to Solo floating back to them. She feels him falter very minutely, perhaps a clench of his fist, for her lack of retaliation. But he stays.   

She has missed these dares of his.  

Gaby picks up and curves his hand over the fullness of her thigh. He doesn’t look at her, or at Solo, or at anybody else in the room. His gaze is misted, the squaring of his shoulders discreet. He squeezes very, very cautiously between the risen hem of her dress and the high ring of her hold-ups, gossamer silk and cooling skin blending under his fingers.   

She could watch his fingertips grow pale for pressing into her if she dared, but he’s hidden. They both are. She feels now that she has a huge new power, and that all the amber glass twinkling above her head has become a halo of swords, just waiting to drop on them both. 

 

\- - - 

 

It is quieter here, walking by all the sleeping cars and locked up shop fronts to the residential flats. Her building is nestled down a row of mirror images; pillared and covered porch, black and white tiles underfoot, iron railings. All is monochromatic, slow, yellow-lit with the strange sepia tone of the city at night.  

At the bottom of the steps, Illya hesitates. Gaby, in the reflection of the brass door knocker, watches him glance up and down the street. She smiles down at her keys, idling there for perhaps a little too long just to make him wait.  

She opens the door, and she leaves it wide open behind her. She pads up the foyer stairs, listens hard.  

A few moments later, his shoes brush coarsely over the mat, and she turns to see him folding his hat tightly in his hands, scanning the hall for shadows in his way.  

 

\- - -  

 

Two tins land on the kitchen table with a demonstrative clunk. She waits for his horror, perhaps some form of rebuke. 

“Is this what you had in mind?” she prompts, when he only peers coyly at her from the corner of his eye. She hovers just close enough, so he might take her forearm if he’d like; pull her down to his level to lecture her on the merits of cooking from the fruits of the land, or whatever it is his manifesto insists upon this week. 

“Close enough.” He’s fond.  

“So Solo hasn’t spoiled you.” 

“I am only surprised that you took my advice.” 

“It was my idea.” 

Illya hums, unconvinced.  

“Stew it is,” Gaby says curtly, and whisks up the tins to slop them into a pot.  

At the stove, she feels his eyes on her. So consciously that when he rises she expects him to crowd her there, press close behind her; hopes that he’ll touch her, take her waist and move her hair aside to kiss the nape of her neck, start something.

Gaby blinks, swallows, opens her mouth to fill the quiet, when he appears over her shoulder. 

“Black pepper.”  

“Get some bread and sit down.” 

“Bread?” 

She tilts her head at the cabinet. He hunts for the loaf, tuts openly at her empty shelves, and takes two mismatching bowls from the draining board to lay on the table. This is not what she had expected at this hour, in this room, but it is easy. And to see him squashed into this tiny kitchen again is... she doesn’t know what it is. It feels comfortable. Perhaps that’s all. Or perhaps she is only humbled because Illya’s idea of a fiery reunion is to walk her home, eat dubious tinned stew there.  

What more had she expected?  

She brings the pot to the table, and Illya arranges the mats for her to set it down. She gives him the ladle and he serves her far too much. 

“What meat is this?” he holds up a chunk on his spoon. 

Gaby shrugs. 

Illya eats it, takes another. “And you say my agency serves donkey.” 

“I never said donkey.” 

“This was heavily implied.” 

She studies him, the neat parting of his hair as he ducks for a spoonful. “You had a surprise for me.” 

Illya looks up, caught. 

“You’re armed?” she asks. 

“Yes.” 

She takes a spoonful of her own, blows on it. “Should I be?” 

“I hope not.” 

“Then out with it.” 

“Hot stew is short range ballistic weapon,” he says, and smiles for her impatience. “Eat. Then, your surprise.” 

 

\- - -  

 

Gaby tears at her bread, looking out of the window. Or rather, at it. She can’t register much beyond their faint reflection; sitting in her brightly-lit kitchen together, this yellow square in the night a show for anyone caring to look. Two at a table, like a hundred more of them down her street, above and below her. She wonders if any have a similar story to them in London, in the whole world. Few, she imagines. Maybe none at all. 

Illya notes her empty bowl, her ruined bread, and reaches inside his jacket. Finally, _finally_.

His hand comes out in a gently closed fist, and he holds it across the table to her, palm unfolding. In the centre is something small and pale silver, with a white leather strap and a face as round and opalescent as the moon.   

Gaby’s narrow eyes meet his. She reaches out, takes it. 

“A watch,” she says slowly, daring him to correct her. 

He waits.  

She turns it over, and she sees it: a slim, almost invisible fourth hand, angling steadily at three hours ahead. Gaby stares at it a while, composing herself. 

Illya’s expression falters. “It is too much,” he admits, and reaches to take it back. 

She keeps it. “You armed yourself for this.” 

“You understand.” 

On the face, the Cyrillic branding has been meticulously picked out, glossed over with that strange mother-of-pearl, wiped clean of its origin. For her cover? His anonymity? If Solo were to see it, they’d be lashed with insinuation from dawn until dusk. Everywhere else, too, she would be better off without such disclosure to her allegiances.  

 _Allegiance_ , she corrects quickly, firmly. Singular.   

“I can remove it. The hand. It can be set to different time.” She has not seen him so urgent in a while, almost tripping over himself. If it weren’t for his mastered stoicism, she might see fear in him. She knows what he’s afraid of; presenting an East German girl, and Gaby in particular, a gift that could easily be construed as a leash, a bind to another.

“You put that in there?” 

“Yes.”  

Another of his little machines, an intricacy. She pictures him at his desk again; a private task outside of work, finishing this. It has cost him more than time and suspicion from his handler if he were spotted; he’s struggling for the offering, more vulnerable than his telephone calls, this strange, intimate thing. 

“I will return it.” 

“No.” She turns it over. The back bears no engraving at all. Three hours ahead to Moscow, to peer at only when she wishes to. It’s a lot. Not too much, but a lot nonetheless. “You are going back?” 

“No, not now. Not for a while.” His doubting hand retreats to zip up his jacket. “For then.” 

“Tracker? Tranquiliser in the buckle?” 

Illya smiles, finally. “No.” 

“Grappling hook?” 

“Can be arranged.” 

Gaby smiles cautiously back. “Well, thank you.” She wraps it around her wrist, secures it with a brand new pop through the leather. He looks at it softly until she catches him. 

He rises to stack the bowls. 

“I’ll do it,” she hurries. Facing the sink, at least, she can release the stupid, giddy grin pulling at the corners of her mouth. 

She pries the empty bowls from him and makes for the sink, when Illya’s arm becomes a gate to push through. He’s sitting, reaching out to take her hip and stop her in her tracks. He peers up warmly from his chair, and everything in Gaby’s stomach flips and turns.

She’s ushered to stand squarely in front of him. There he takes to her other hip too, turns her only slightly on the spot from side to side. Gaby rolls her eyes, puts the bowls back on the table. He’s chest height, taking her in, and when she comes even closer he must look up from beneath his lashes to see her. Dark gold, soft.  

So she steps one leg around him, and then the other, and she sits. 

Illya swallows, his head tilting back a little.  

“What are you staring at?” she asks, quietly, because everything feels so loud. 

“You.” 

“And?” 

“Not bad.” His hands bravely settle on her hips. “It is nice to see you.” 

Nice to see and to hear, all at once. He hesitates only slightly before brushing up to take her waist, pull her closer. Behind her his knees are planted far apart, and she has little means to shift back even if she wanted to. Which she absolutely does not.

She edges closer to meet him, to feel his belt dig into her inner thigh. His eyes are too steady on hers, desperate not to look down. 

“You have thought of this before?” she asks. “Eating this miserable stew. Having me, here?” 

“Having you.” 

“You’ve thought of that.” 

“You know this.” 

She tilts her chin at the table, eyes on him. “You sat in the same chair.” 

“Yes.” 

“Why?” 

He shrugs, so she settles her arms over his shoulders to weigh them back down. “Suppose I like this chair.” 

“You like what happened to you there.” 

“Yes.” 

“So?” 

She’s tugged deeper into Illya’s lap, his fingertips tightening against the small of her back. There’s no mistaking it. His stomach is firm and warm between her legs and there is no room for anything but for her to move even closer, sit flush against him, seal the impossible distance.  

So she does. 

He makes a satisfied little sound, wraps around her. Without warning he presses a kiss to the curve of her jaw and Gaby feels it like the lick of a flame, hot and clean and brand new. She leans into it, encouraging him to move, take another. His tired sigh shivers down her neck and Gaby catches her own wrists behind his shoulders, runs her thumb over that chilly little circle of glass.  

He’s slow, deliberate, gauging her pulse. If the rush through her ears is any indication, he’ll find it thundering shamefully under him. When he reaches the soft patch beneath her ear she hunts for the floor to steady herself, so she doesn’t clamp her thighs, hurry him. 

Is this too easy? Is she too easy? 

He pulls back as if he’s heard her. “Ok?” 

Gaby nods.  

“What do you want?” 

“Oh, god,” she murmurs resentfully. Illya noses along the shadow of her cheek, kisses the corner of her mouth. “ _That_.” 

“Hm.” He does it again, and she tries not to tilt to meet his kiss cleanly. He hovers, brushing over her, “What else?” 

“You are making me ask?” 

“Precaution,” he says, and she feels his smile against her cheek; too close to see it for herself, hiding there. “I would like to leave without casualty.” 

“You’re doing well.” 

“Thank you.” 

“A little slow.” 

“You have somewhere to be?” 

She admires her watch over his shoulder. “No.” 

Illya shrugs again, and with the roll of his shoulders her arms slip further down the back of the chair, lured in.  

“You have waited two months,” she encourages. 

“Longer.” 

Brushing through the back of his hair earns her a slow, warm blink. “I expected a little more urgency.” 

“You want urgent?” 

Gaby pauses, presses her lips together. Maybe. Maybe she wants that; grabbing hands and mess, biting. Some gasps, knocked noses and teeth. What does he want? His eyes are soft, waiting for her. No darting, no scanning. Only patient, pleased.  

She kisses him before he’s ready and he only lets out a sigh. She can taste the scotch on just the tip of his tongue behind his teeth, tilts her head for him until he pushes back with a groan, firmly draws her in. When she runs her thumb over his unshaven cheek he hums into her, squeezes tighter, and she wonders what she must taste like to him. Probably stew — likely why he’s so eager to push between her shoulders to taste more, to part her lips again with his tongue and bravely open her up. Warm, gentling... When will that mouth stop sending her into a tailspin? The deep sounds he makes when he breathes; small moans numbed by the seal of his lips again, sending heat coursing down her throat, her chest, into the pit of her stomach to prickle there, spreading and slowing her like warm glue.   

Illya sits back and tugs her with him, a firm jolt, and Gaby has to turn her head to let out a breath. He searches for her mouth again; pulls her back with a soft, plush press, demanding to know how she could leave it.  

She cups the back of his neck, parts from him with a peppering of smaller kisses to find his eyes closed, brow raised.  

“Well,” she breathes, “that’s that out of the way.”  

He nods, senseless, and blinks at her. With a shift over his lap she feels him, and does her very best not to clear her throat, retreat. He notices, and if he’s embarrassed he’s doing a far better job of hiding it than she is. 

“Now what?” 

His fingertips press into her hips, kneading a little, and they slip around to her back, lower, where she’s rolled down experimentally to meet him again. His eyes drop to the skirt of her dress, the hold-ups he’d warmed in secret just peeking into view.  

She feels her pupils darting and knows they’re uncomfortable to look into, but he does, searching for her in there. 

“What do you want?” she presses. 

“Let me hear you now. Here.” 

What little space they have between them is malleable. She can swipe her hand through the air and warp it, weight and heat. Illya is to be taken as she wishes. Here in her kitchen, she can come back for seconds, thirds, and anything else he’ll give her. Private and untapped, synchronised at last. Meeting in the middle. 

“I feel it,” he murmurs, and adopts a frown she knows herself; one saved for second languages, for words that don’t fit, “when you make your sounds just now.” 

“Oh.” 

Only the very tips of his ears grow pink. It’s something she hasn’t had real chance to appreciate before. She can measure him minutely, so she reacquaints herself with the other small gestures. The crease between his brows — deepened, surely, in his months spent working with she and Solo — and his scar at his temple, the sharp point of his nose. Eyes very, very wide and blue. He looks afraid of her. 

She traces his neck with small, ghosting fingers, where his pulse thumps and thumps. “Mr Several Kilometres,” she mutters, and he manages to roll his eyes. “Already?” 

“Do you want to?”  

“Yes.” 

He nods for too long. “Good,” he says, and frowns deeper.  

“Relax.” 

He nods again, takes her firmly by the waist to lift her up, stand her on her feet. She is unsteady; the drink is mercifully wearing off, but the warmth of him is missing from the back of her thighs. Only shortly, she thinks. That doesn't help.  

Illya stands too, enormous, and she lifts his heavy hand to pull him down her hall, the stew forgotten and his palm warm and gripping tight, to follow her. 

 

\- - -  

 

“I thought it was exaggeration,” Illya confesses between her quick kisses, dumbfounded. 

“What?” 

“There are so many.” 

Gaby pauses, follows his eyes across the room. Her bed, loaded messily with all her hundreds of pillows, overstuffed cushions. That he remembers them at all spreads a much-needed confirmation through her chest. 

She smiles at him, pulls him back down to kiss away the disapproving purse of his lips. “Your posture will power through for one night.” 

Illya hums grimly, closes her bedroom door behind him. She tries to ignore the finality of it, how it burns in her ears and into her back as she turns him around by the cuffs of his jacket, guides him to the foot of her bed. She pushes him down to sit.  

She nods at his jacket and leaves him to it, begins her struggle with the hidden zip of her dress. Once his shoes are off and he’s stripped to the waist, she’s still nowhere close. Illya finally pulls her between his spread knees to turn her around, slip the tiny fastening down to the small of her back for her.  

Slowing to push the shoulders down too, he presses into the loosened fabric at her waist, holds her there for a moment. 

“Illya?” she peers back at him, slipping off her earrings. He’s looking thoughtfully at the line of her back, her shoulder blades. He has seen them before, in any number of outfits he’s chosen for her. What has he seen now? 

He pulls the dress the rest of the way down to fall at her feet.  

“Looking.” 

“Well,” she murmurs, pink, “hurry up.” 

 

\- - - 

 

All she can think to do to stop her hands wavering oddly at the sight of him is pull down her stockings, bundle them carelessly in her hands, wait. 

She has not thought this far ahead. There is wishing, suggestion, and then there is execution. She can touch him now and he will let her. Encourage her, sound and sight both.  

He said he knows what she wants, would give her nothing less. 

Gaby kneels on either side of him and pushes him up the mattress with her, a little helpless for the heat of his chest under her hand. She splays her fingers with heady fascination, sinks him into those loathsome pillows. 

 

\- - - 

 

“On the phone,” she says, the risk marked in the sudden downturn of his eyes, “you said very little.” 

“I told you what I think of. That is all you wanted to know.” 

“To have me like this,” she says, gesturing to her legs around him as if ticking off a list. “All right. You have it. Something about a wall?” 

Illya’s jaw tightens, tilts up to her towering over him. “This was months ago.” 

“Only two.” She shifts on him, settling her weight low. A cut little breath falls out of him, softening into a satisfied hum. He wraps his fingers around her hips, has her pin him deeper into the mattress. 

Gaby closes her eyes for a moment, gathers herself. “What do you want now, Illya?” 

He’s taken by that, makes a gentle noise in the back of his throat for it. His fingertips press in. “This is good.” 

She links her fingers behind the nape of his neck to feel the bristles there. “All right.” 

“How do you want me?” 

A pulse bolts through her thighs. Whatever she says next, he’ll do it. Gaby can only take him in for a few moments, wondering if it’s a nuance of his language or if this is truly the fearsome Red Peril she is straddling now, growing senseless over. This scarred chest that rises steadily, those same hands that shake in anger but are deft now, skilled and steady, though they feel molten while spreading over her. Killer, occupier.  

“Up,” she manages, low. He follows the pull of her hands. She smooths over his broad shoulders to settle them, drawing up tight now with the nerves he’s trying to stifle. “Sit back.” 

She follows him on her knees to press him against the headboard, his back to all the hundreds of pillows, and settles into his lap again. 

“Like this,” she decides, with a testing swivel of her hips. 

He shifts his shoulders, getting used to the wall of cushions around him. 

Gaby raises her brow. “Do you like them?” 

“Soft,” he mutters, contemptibly. 

“Yes,” she says. “Soft.” 

He seems to remember where he is, and Gaby hungrily watches a swallow rise and fall in his throat. She traces behind her, up his thigh. Without looking up from his lap she can hear the new parting of his mouth, his intake of breath, and she smiles where he can’t see her.  

“Ok?” 

He nods for a long while, opening his eyes only when she doesn't answer. “Yes.” 

She palms over him gently, looks up for only a moment before he pulls her in by the nape of her neck, kisses her as if he’d forgotten to. She leans into him, and he rounds behind her thighs to pull her up, in, close. 

 

\- - - 

 

“You sound much better like this,” he says, breathing hard between kisses. “Here.” 

“Mm.” 

“Poor reception. Insulator—” 

“The delay,” Gaby agrees, and runs both hands up his stomach, the cut of his chest, thrilling for the sounds he makes and all the muscle tensing as she goes. “Better now.” 

Illya doesn’t argue. His arms cross closer around her, and he brushes her hair over her shoulder to gently suck a kiss to the curve there. She lets out a fond little huff, and then he rolls her down the flat of his stomach. 

She falters, pushes into the bridge of his neck to hold on and grind with him. And he’s hypnotised, staring with wide eyes and furrowed brow down at the heat of her. 

“Illya?” She studies one of his hands, its gentle shake on her skin. “How are you doing?” 

He nods, firms his grip to keep her there. His fingertip slips under the satin at her hip, begins to draw calm little circles.  

“Good.” 

 

\- - -  

 

He’s losing himself but she’s right there with him. For this, he isn’t too embarrassed. She’s not finished tracing him, so much left to cover. She wants him to lie down, wants him to sit up — anything, everything too slow.  

Gaby focuses with the _snip-snip_  of her bra being unclasped, and before she even finishes shrugging it off Illya takes her in his palms, boyish and grateful.  

Breathing a laugh, she doubles his weight to encourage him; have him brush over her nipples with his thumbs until she can’t laugh anymore, can only drag down over his lap to release the tension spreading hot between her thighs, melting.  

 She must look a wreck already. He certainly does. 

 

\- - - 

 

“You can curse, Illya. It’s okay.” 

The grit of his teeth tightens, white and sharp. She punctuates her point with another heavy trace over him with her hand, reaching back to unbuckle his belt. 

“Is rude,” he mutters, one hand smoothing up her body to rest between her breasts. 

Gaby scoffs, pulls the belt out in one long drag. She drops it over the bed, twists at the waist to begin shifting his trousers and all the rest down his thighs, have him kick them down and off. 

She’s idly combing through her ponytail and trying not to stare when she turns back again, finds him staring openly for himself. 

“What?” 

“Nothing,” he says.  

She pushes his tousled hair back for him, and he leans into it. “What’s the matter?” 

“You want me to curse.” 

“If you want to, you should.” 

Reluctant, petulant. “I will have to, I think.” 

She smiles, leans down to kiss him sharply.

He takes her waist and tugs her to her knees, reaching to cover her chest in open-mouthed kisses, breathing loud and quick. She steels herself against the headboard and leans into him. He threatens to kiss her into bruises. He tongues cautiously over a nipple and she sighs into his crown, clutches his hair to encourage him, and he does it again, better, so she hangs her head to let her groan fall out by his ear, clear and humming, because she knows what it can do.

He rests his forehead on her chest. “ _Fuck—_ ” 

“Fuck!” Gaby echoes loudly, delightedly, and beams at him.

Illya, mortified, clamps his palm over her mouth. 

 

\- - -  

 

The strain in her thighs for kneeling still like this, stretching over him, is spreading. She needs to move. But he’s slipping under the gathered edge of her underwear, circling a path over her bare skin. The dip beside her hipbone, she discovers, is dizzyingly ticklish. 

“You were asking for me,” he says, prompting her. He tilts his head, trying to catch her eye. “You often think of this too, though you hide it.” 

Gaby says nothing.  

She has done something to incense him, spur him to this interrogation. He has an objective. His nerves are forgotten. She doesn’t know yet if she is thankful for it. 

He carefully slips down her underwear until the satin pools at the plush fold of her knees, and he feels his way back up between them. There’s a sleepy raise to his brow, and he is waiting for an answer. 

“So, you said you wanted me here,” he cups a broad palm against her inner thigh, squeezes gently. Gaby presses her lips together and sighs shakily through her nose. “But what else?” 

“Keep talking.”  

Illya smiles. “Urgent,” he confirms. “Tasting you. Asking how we will fuck?” 

Gaby forces herself not to bury her face in his neck. All her heat floods into her cheeks, rushes to her thighs. She’d like very much for him to stop looking at her as if she’s committed a heinous crime. Instead she reaches past his teasing hands to curl around his bare cock; have him weaken a little, level the field. 

His head drops back to the headboard, a groan tripping out before he catches it. He lets her touch. When she firms her fingers around him, she only spots the twitch of his jaw before he pinches her underwear to finish tugging them down her calves, has her step out of and drop them off the bed. He runs his hands back up her legs, circling to find her where she’s slick and warm to surrender her advantage. 

Gaby lets out a noise that makes him quicken, his thighs tensing into the mattress. She kisses him clumsily, all her focus driven into the new roll of his fingertips, cyclical and perfect, slipping up now to brush over her clit. 

She pushes her face into his neck and huffs heavily, needing.  

“Shh,” he says, though his rhythm falters. “Good?” 

She nods mindlessly.  

He’s quiet for a moment. She feels the craning of him to peer down to see her, to check in. 

Raising her head from the crook of his neck is a waste of time. “Mm.” She kisses him there, the warmth and scent distinct to Illya, all warm, clean musk like a mild honey.  

He slips his touch inside easily, lets out a heated breath of his own. 

“You…” his whole body shifts, and he pushes deeper, “Gaby. You… Please—” 

“Please?” she mumbles closely, certain of how it must feel. She runs her thumb over his cock and he bucks into her touch. 

“Are you—  _Ah_ —” 

“Tonight would be nice.” 

She waits for him to scoff before running her palm from base to tip as confidently as she can, all hammering heart and fear aside for the whole of him. So he’d once worked himself up to this, only listening to her? There’s that power again, manifesting in her whole body for rendering him helpless. She’s light, easily thrown off, but she’s only tugged closer, as if he’s eager for the ruin. 

He loses coherency then, kissing her crown as she peers down to line him up. But first she rolls down along the length of him, hot and hard under her until she feels, if he’d let her, that it could be enough just to have that pressure — that friction of silk skin and hard weight to grind down over, have twitch under her — to finish.  

But he’s close to madness and his grabbing hands are fighting against pulling her onto him. So she takes pity because she needs it now, too, burning from the inside out. He’s good, and in all their No Promises he’d vowed that they both would be. So she indulges him. 

Illya is not a beacon of self-control, but he’s prepared. She plants her hands on his chest and gently lowers as far as she can, and his eyes roll back, brow furrowing.  

She leans to kiss him, and the shift in the angle has her hissing, has him let out a huff of frustration.  

“You do look good like this,” she tells him when she can, and kisses his jaw, rough under her lips and clamped tight. She sits up again just to watch him. “I expected you to be ruined.” 

“So, I was right,” he manages, eyes scrunching shut.  

“And how’s that?” 

“You think of this… all the time.” He rocks up to meet her on her down-stroke, deep and hot, smiles at her.  

Gaby shrugs with all she can afford, straining to get used to him. It’s tight, and he’s struggling to hold back; a care she knew she wouldn't have to ask him for. 

“You look good up there,” he returns. 

She scoffs. “On you?”  

“Yes.” 

He brushes her hair over her shoulder, and Gaby wonders briefly how she’s ended up here before she decides it doesn't matter. Confessions aside, daring phone calls and insulators too, she is here because she wants it, and Gaby has had more than her fair share of not getting what she wants.

It was only a matter of time. 

He finally works into a rhythm. Gently, at first. Necessarily.  

Braced there between the back of her hand and her wrist, overlooking the fingers she’s finally able to splay on his bare chest, is her new watch. Forgotten, ticking away and very real. He’s wearing his, too, the buckle grazing her hip with every heated roll he gives to her. A habit, dismissed in their hurry. Looks like she’s already forming one of her own, too. 

She must be smiling senselessly, because when Illya notes what she’s looking at he focuses, his expression softening, and deepens a slow thrust to bring her back. 

Brushing his hair back, she rides down with intent until that focus dissolves, and he’s straining, eyes closed tight and hands sliding from her hips to her thighs, rough and gentling both. Gaby blows her hair out of her eyes, goes harder until she’s weak, and slips lower to lean on his chest to have him work; wrap his arms strongly around her waist to push up into her, his breath ghosting over her head. 

“Illya?” 

It takes him a moment. “Da?” 

She settles closer, pleased, and presses her hot cheek to his chest. “Nothing.” 

He nods and goes on, until he curses like his life depends on it, moaning her name and all its forms in his short breaths in between. 

  

\- - - 

 

The pillow soothes Gaby’s burning cheek, a pleasant stretch drawing through her hips, her strained thighs, all her bones.   

Illya’s knuckles graze down the line of her back. Relentless. 

“Mm?”  

The sheets shift, her mountain of cushions teetering on the brink. He clears a few aside with a broad sweep and begins his slow descent, a warm trail of kisses between her shoulders. His elbows brace either side of hers, crowding close, heavy, working his way down her tired body until Gaby just has to twist, has to watch him hesitate a hot kiss to the small of her back. He hums there, thoughtful. Both the huge palms spanning her waist and the mumbling kiss he presses between them wake her, bright and shivering, to key her up again with that ready, undulating heat. 

Where has he seen this, to want to do it to her now? 

Does he only want to? 

She presses deeper into the pillows, lifts her hips to tempt him. 

He’s hesitating there, brushing the curve of her back. She feels the point of his nose, the scratch of his jaw over her two shallow dimples there. He fails to hide his metronomic tapping, an unbroken code on her skin, a touch that reveals more than his carefully curated words. 

She only hopes he’ll flip her over, carry on. 

Whatever he’s wrestling with, he reconsiders. He elbows his way back up to kiss her ear, draw a real shiver out of her. It almost fizzles up her drop of heart. He settles on his back to close his eyes, slowing down almost to sleep, and she lets him, until she bravely presses a hot, soft kiss to his cock and he nearly jumps through the roof.  

 

 - - - 

 

When Gaby wriggles out from under him and all the tangled sheets, his fingers circle her wrist. She turns to see him sprawled over her mattress, face down, warm and enormous in the light of her lamp. A sated mass of shadow and weight. 

An unfinished groan tugs in Gaby’s throat, petulant and spoiled for leaving this behind, for the thought of tomorrow morning. She’s bare from top to toe, and he looks at her with a gaze she loathes on other men but on him she finds it thrills her.  

If he wasn’t staring, she’d frown at herself; put up all those walls she’s learned to build, brick by brick. She doesn’t mind that he sees her like this, comfortable, sated, and that sets something strange in her chest; something that feels like the picking of an old wound, tender and threatening. She does her best to quell it.  

He yanks her back to bed, but she resists. 

“Tea?” she asks, twisting in his grip the way he’d taught her. She’s one step from breaking out of it, or from breaking his wrist cleanly. He has shown her how far to go should she need to; to tear out of reach, to flee. 

She doesn’t.

Illya shakes his head, a noisy shift over her pillows. He pulls up his knee a little, and the muscle of his thigh is a hypnotist’s wheel, his sleepy groan enticing, and before she can defend herself he’s kneeling on the edge of the bed, then standing to loom over her.  

She dips a glance from his eyes to his radiating chest, back up again.  

“Well, I’m making some.” 

He smiles tiredly, kisses her forehead with unexpected ease. What had she expected? For him to dress, to leave? To meet her again at HQ tomorrow, as if it had never happened?  

It has gone this way for her before. 

Her hand rests loosely in his, and he crowds her against the wall by her door, step by step. He leans all the way down to nose at her temple, kiss her cheek, her neck, her shoulder.  

Gaby rolls her eyes at him, before he draws her hand against the wall to pin it there. Then she can’t do much of anything at all. The other hangs uselessly, considering touching him where he clearly needs it but too soon he’s out of reach, lowering to kneel on the floor and press an open-mouthed kiss to the line of her stomach, the arc of her ribs.  

So she pushes her free, unsteady hand through his hair instead, and he moans warmly, kisses harder. Gaby lets out a nervous laugh, and feels his smile on her skin, the spread of his lips, the sudden nip of his teeth.   

He nudges her feet apart, pulls her hips from the wall to meet him, and sits back on his heels. What can she do? He firms her hand against the wall, and his thumb presses idly into her palm as if they’re sat in a café; as if she’s a chaste and early interest to him, not curling in on herself to have him hurry up, finish this torture, let her breathe again.  

She only holds his gaze for a second. The blue is too much, the brow too soft and lashes too long, too gentle for his intentions, a contradiction. So he starts what she’d dazedly confessed to him, to have him taste, and she lets out an ugly noise, pulls easily out of his bind to the wall to weave both palms against the back of his head and _push_.  

A torn breath shakes out of her and she drops hurriedly to the carpet, tugs him by the hair to follow her and carry on. He floods the nerves between her thighs and drains them, filling her all the way back up again with a rushing course of damp heat. He grips the back of her thighs almost tight enough to bruise, pushes them higher, and Gaby squeezes her eyes shut. She can’t stop pushing into his crown, pulling him in for every rumbling moan he lets out for being directed, showing him what she wants.  

“Oh my _god_.” 

“Hm,” he confirms, sucking with another roll of his tongue. 

She crosses her calves over his shoulders and bucks up, hears the whack of her arm on the dresser before she feels it. He tugs it to his eye line, glances at it, lets it go.  

Illya’s back is heavy and full under her heels and she presses in, watches with all the sense she has left as it shifts and tenses, and the mesmerising roll of his hips as he lowers to lie flat on the carpet, seeking pressure there. 

His hair is blond and damp, and her fingers shake through it like bowing wheat until he curses into her for what he sees and hears; when she sobs out his name until it wavers and cracks, and her back arches high to chase release.  

Behind the water pooling from her eyes, the walls and floor and ceiling of her bedroom shrink to a blurry, shaking dot. 

  

\- - - 

 

Illya wanders around her bedroom, picking up her things to look at them. She would like to think he is only curious, but she finds little comfort in lies. Sweet to think he is looking to remove any bugs she’s missed. Bitter if he suspects her of a trick.  

She studies him while picking at a tassel of one of her cushions. The rest are strewn about after he’d tossed her back on the mattress; rolled over her with all his weight and muscle to wrestle her, correct her form authoritatively, laugh at her weak, meaningless threats.   

Weariness seeps through her muscles in a way it hasn’t since ballet. She stretches into it. Her lips are bruised and numbing for kissing him when she wants; none of this unreachable want for only thinking of it, but taking, taking, taking, until they both grow clumsy with it. He’d only gotten to his feet to fetch two glasses of water and lazily return to her, lips and tongue cold and fresh, making her shiver.   

Gaby wants to lay him down and start all over again.   

Gaby has no idea what time it is.   

He hasn’t taken the liberty of putting any clothes on. There isn’t much point, and she isn’t paying attention to much but the shape of him, admittedly ogling just a little. So she doesn’t notice when he stops at her dresser to idly flick through one of her magazines, or when a paper drops out from its pages, sails dreamily down to the carpet.  

“What is this?”  

Gaby’s gaze falls from a red streak between his shoulders to the square in his hand. She shrugs, but she knows, and she dreads.  

He looks at it a moment, the corners still tightly folded, and his smirk spreads from his mouth to the rest of him, with a slight flare of his nose in amusement.  

“What?”  

“ _Sentimental,_ ” he echoes her, tuts, and slips his letter back into her magazine unread. “You are not so good at hiding.”  

 She ignores him, pushes the cushion away to settle back into bed. So? They are even now; her watch, his letter of instructions. Checkmate. Equal vulnerability is not a vulnerability at all.

“Do not wear that to sleep,” he says, rounding to the other side.   

The mattress dips under him, and she thinks: will she be able to sleep tomorrow night, knowing he’s been there? Won’t be there then? A disconcerting thought. She has slept alone, albeit poorly, for hundreds of nights before. No abundance of weight and warmth from another body should change that one constant.

He brings her left hand up to the pillows, has her look at the watch.  

“Oh.” She readies to unbuckle it, but he’s already there. He slips it off and pulls out the tiny dial from its side, shows it to her. It’s hair-thin, the needle. Only an inch long.  

“You said it was clean,” she accuses, rubbing her bare wrist.  

“I said no bug.” He slips it back in with a hushed click. “Precaution. For picking locks, so on.”  

“We have Solo.”  

He gives her an amused little glance beneath his brow, a shake of the head. “Do not rely on Solo.”  

Illya puts her watch on the nightstand and begins taking off his own.

And Gaby, insistent on avoiding morning, has a beautiful idea.  

She gets out of bed, sweeps across the room under his marksman’s stare, and begins rifling through her chest of drawers.   

Gaby finds them, grins, steps into the bottoms.  

“What are you doing?” He’s on his elbows, peering over the high end of the bed.   

She pulls on the sleeves, peers demurely over her shoulder at him.   

“No.” His expression is split, indignant, watching her fasten up the buttons one at a time.  

“You would rather I slept in the nude?” she tuts at his gaunt expression, shakes her head. “No. It is too hot in there for that. You’re like a furnace, all cold hands but burning up everywhere else.”  

“Is your fault.”  

She smiles cruelly at him, neatens her collar.   

“Come here.”  

When she’s ready, Gaby saunters over in her bare feet, tiptoeing, leisurely. She steps too close and is seized, flipped onto her back with an _oomph_.  

She shakes the her hair out of her eyes, smiles.  

“You test me.”  

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He’s too distracted to challenge her; is looking — not heatedly, as she’d expected, but wistfully — over her nightshirt, which has rucked up about the shoulders. He measures her intently.  

“What is it?”   

“Nice to see you,” he confirms. He watches his own hand sneak beneath the blue pyjama shirt, roaming hungrily.   

“Are you staying the night?”   

He stills, palm flat on her stomach. He drags his gaze up to her, gauging every wrong thing to say before he lands on the right one. “If you want.”  

She shrugs, hopes he knows.  

“Ok.”  

“Ok, you’re staying?”  

“I would like to.”  

“Good.”  

He idly twists the bow at her waist, lets it go. “I like this.”  

“I know.”  

“No. This.” His palm shifts up her waist, back down again.

She nods, full to the brim with a reluctant, nagging worry.

“You cannot know how often I have thought of it.” 

“You need a hobby.” 

He rolls his eyes. “Telephone is two-way transmission.” 

“And?” 

“You called out for me.” 

“No.” 

“Many times. Tonight, too. So noisy.” 

Gaby covers his hand on her stomach, turns her head away. 

He kisses her ear until she squirms out to look back up at him. “I want to hear it on you again.” 

“Will you never rest?” She thumps his chest, pats him gently as if testing wet paint. “You have embarrassed me enough.” 

“Gaby,” he says, and still she leans into it despite herself. How it sounds on him; how although there’s no one else in the room he still enjoys sounding it out, having her listen to him. 

He thinks for a while, palming aimlessly over her. He slips his other arm beneath her head for her to lean on, and she settles down.

“This is impossible,” he tells her.

She nods on his arm, every muscle sinking as she begins reluctantly drifting off. His hand firms, checking she’s still there with him before he might go on.

“Welcome home, anyway,” Gaby mumbles tiredly, and flinches dead still.

He feels it. He must, because he only squeezes her side warmly, and he doesn't throw himself bodily out of the door.

“Thank you.”

She knows what it costs him, to let it go. So she flops over to lie on top of him, her cheek on his chest to feel it, should he choose to speak again, but also to hide. She waits until his hand softens over the crinkle of her pyjamas, and his breathing slows to calm.

And then her telephone rings.

Illya’s eyes snap open.

Gaby turns on his chest to squint at the clock. 12:42am. She hopes. She truly could have been rolling around with him until noon, for all she knew, for how insignificant everything else has become.

The phone shudders with the incessant ringing, where anyone else at this hour would give in.

“Solo,” they agree with an exhausted disdain. And who else could it be? The only good cause to call her at such an hour is under her now, finally, surrounded by a nest of feather pillows and cotton and the soft stretch of her headboard.

She touches his pursed mouth curiously, prodding at him. He almost smiles.

It rings on, and on, and on.

“Don’t.”

She reaches out slowly, daring him to stop her, all dancing fingers and flick of the wrist. He stares at her, at the phone, back again, and flashes his eyes.

Her fingers just manage to clasp around the handset when he grabs her, flops her onto her back across the other side of the bed, pinning her with all his weight.

The phone falls to the floor with an expensive clatter, the last bell crying out at them from the floor.

It’s Illya’s turn to freeze. He covers her grinning mouth, and she nips at his fingers with her teeth.

His lips press together, begging for her cooperation.

Still, they both must strain to hear it, knowing:

“ _Gabriella Teller, you crafty little—_ ”

Illya throws a torrent of pillows at the handset and the feather duvet too, numbing Napoleon’s drawl, and he pulls his hand back from Gaby’s mouth only to kiss her sharply, and very, very quietly.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [writes ELEVEN THOUSAND WORDS] soRRY omg... Sorry. I cannot believe it got this long. I can't imagine anybody seeing 'phone sex' as a tag, 18k as a word count, and managing anything but cackle omg...  
> Illya... that phone bill... you don't have the salary...
> 
> Also, apologies for taking so long to post! Work has been... a lot, and the wonderful response to the first chapter had me a little nervous to post another! Hope this will suffice!! Thank you again for your lovely comments and all these kudos! I am verily overwhelmed. Much love xx

**Author's Note:**

> Dirty talk?? In a second language?? Impossible. Similarly, impossible to write this entirely in character, I think!  
> Face to face? I think Gaby is capable of dirty talk, absolutely. Illya would perhaps nod furiously and offer one or two surprises, but over the phone I imagine these two would be v frightened to be vulnerable without being able to scan the other's reaction, know how best to proceed, protect themselves if they overstep. I feel like getting soppy and just listening to each other would be enough? For only having kissed, touched gently so far? WHO KNOWS?
> 
> But I had fun writing this, and I hope you all enjoyed it too!
> 
> (ALSO: I don't speak one lick of German! Forgive me, and please don't fear to correct my mistakes if there are any! Thank you!!)


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